Inside a former Walmart, nearly 1,500 migrant children are held

A section of border fence near Brownsville, Texas, where shelters have been set up to house migrants.

A section of border fence near Brownsville, Texas, where shelters have been set up to house migrants.

Photo: Matthew Busch / New York Times

Photo: Matthew Busch / New York Times

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A section of border fence near Brownsville, Texas, where shelters have been set up to house migrants.

A section of border fence near Brownsville, Texas, where shelters have been set up to house migrants.

Photo: Matthew Busch / New York Times

Inside a former Walmart, nearly 1,500 migrant children are held

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BROWNSVILLE, Texas — In the loading docks, children sat in a darkened auditorium watching the animated movie “Moana.”

Where there were once racks of clothes and aisles of appliances, there were now spotless dorm-style bedrooms with neatly made beds and Pokemon posters on the walls. The back parking lots were now makeshift soccer fields and volleyball courts. The McDonald’s was now the cafeteria. All this made it difficult to visualize what the sprawling facility used to be — a former Walmart Supercenter.

The converted retail store at the southern tip of Texas has become the largest licensed migrant children’s shelter in the country — a warehouse for nearly 1,500 boys ages 10 to 17 who were caught illegally crossing the border.

The teeming, 250,000-square-foot facility is a model of border life in Trump-era America, part of a growing industry of detention centers and shelters as federal authorities scramble to comply with the president’s order to end “catch and release” of migrants illegally entering the country. Now that children are often being separated from their parents, this facility has had to obtain a waiver from the state to expand its capacity.

Cots are being added to sleeping areas. The staff is expanding. But even that is not enough. Federal authorities are considering establishing tent cities on Army and Air Force bases, and have already transferred hundreds of immigrant detainees to temporary housing at federal prisons.

The federal Office of Refugee Resettlement is now overseeing an estimated 100 shelters in 17 states, serving a population that has grown to more than 11,000 youths. One of the biggest concentrations is here near the border in South Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley, one of the poorest regions in the nation. There are about 10 shelters in three Valley counties, the majority in the Cameron County cities of Brownsville, Harlingen and San Benito.

The shelters in and near Brownsville have become big business, employing thousands of residents and bringing abandoned stores, schools and other buildings back to life in a county where the median household income is $34,578 and the percentage of those living below the federal poverty line is 29.1, far higher than the national poverty rate of 12.7 percent.

But they have also raised questions about federal oversight and management, and the invisibility under which many of them operate.

Numerous shelters that care for unaccompanied migrant youth in Texas have been cited by state child care facility regulators for dozens of violations in recent years, according to data from two of the state’s oversight agencies, the Texas Health and Human Services Commission and the Department of Family and Protective Services. The majority of the violations were for minor infractions, including incomplete child records. But some were for more serious problems.

At least 13 deficiency citations have been filed against the shelter at the former Walmart in Brownsville.